Plain answers
What is Ickly?
Ickly is a free app for parents that shows what illnesses are circulating at a specific school, daycare, or camp right now, based on anonymous reports from other parents in that community.
Parents log how their kids are feeling in about 20 seconds, follow the schools their children attend, and get an alert when something starts spreading there.
It is an early signal, not a diagnosis. It sits between official surveillance (accurate but weeks behind) and the class group chat (immediate but unstructured).
Questions parents actually ask
No hedging, no marketing language. If the answer is "it depends on your neighborhood," we say that.
What is the Ickly app?
Ickly is a free community health app for parents. You follow the schools, daycares, or camps your children attend, log how your family is feeling each week, and see what illnesses other parents are reporting at those same places. When activity spikes at a school you follow, Ickly emails you a heads up. Reports are anonymous and shown only as aggregated community trends.
Are the illnesses on Ickly medically confirmed?
Some are. When a parent gets a diagnosis from a doctor, urgent care, or a home or clinic test, they can mark the report as a confirmed diagnosis, and Ickly labels it that way everywhere it appears. Confirmed diagnoses are weighted more heavily and lead our alerts and weekly digests. Unconfirmed reports are still shown, but always labeled as symptoms rather than a diagnosis. You can tell the two apart at a glance on every school page.
How does Ickly stop 'the flu' and 'a bad cold' from being reported inconsistently?
Parents do not type free text into the trend data. They pick from a fixed list of illnesses and symptoms (strep throat, hand foot and mouth, RSV, influenza, stomach bug, pink eye, and so on), so every report maps to the same category. Follow-up prompts ask whether a diagnosis was received, which upgrades a symptom report into a confirmed one. That taxonomy is what makes counts across a school comparable.
What if nobody at my school uses Ickly yet?
This is the honest limitation of any community app, and we handle it by never faking a signal. If a school does not have enough reports to say anything meaningful, Ickly says so plainly instead of showing a misleading number: you will see 'quiet here' or 'not enough reports yet' rather than a zero that looks like good news. Every signal is shown with a plain-language confidence level based on how many families are reporting and how recently. You can still follow the school, and Ickly will alert you the moment activity does appear. We are Chicago-first and expanding outward, so coverage is deepest there today.
Does Ickly collect my precise location?
No. Ickly works at the ZIP code and school level only. We never store a street address, GPS coordinates, or a precise home location. If you use the 'use my location' button, it is converted to a ZIP code and the underlying coordinates are discarded, and you can always type a ZIP instead.
Are symptom reports tied to my identity?
Reports are linked to your account so you can see and edit your own family history, and they are never shown to anyone else with your identity attached. No other parent, school, or partner can see who filed a report. Public and institutional views show aggregated counts only, and we suppress any bucket with fewer than five reports so a single family can never be picked out.
Who can see the data, and does Ickly sell it?
Parents see aggregated community trends. Schools and clinics that partner with us receive aggregated, suppressed data (per school, per illness, per week, with buckets under five blanked) under a contract that forbids re-identification and onward sale. We do not sell personal health information to data brokers, ad networks, insurers, or pharmaceutical marketers, and we do not run third-party ad targeting.
Can I delete my account and my data?
Yes, from inside the app, with no email request required. Identifiable account data is deleted within 30 days of deletion. Anonymized, aggregated data that can no longer be traced to you may remain in historical trend counts.
How is children's information handled?
Accounts belong to parents and guardians, not children. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from anyone under 13. Children are represented only by an age band and the school they attend, entered by the parent. No child names, no photos, no behavioral profiling of minors, no advertising trackers.
What analytics or third parties does Ickly use?
We use Google Analytics for aggregate page views only, with Google Signals and ad personalization turned off, ad storage and ad user data consent denied, and IPs anonymized. No user identifiers, emails, or report content are sent to Google. Our other processors are infrastructure vendors: our database and auth host, our CDN, our email sender, our payment processor for paid school plans, and our map provider for ZIP-level geocoding.
How is Ickly different from a symptom journal or a public health dashboard?
A symptom journal records your own history for your doctor. A public health dashboard reports confirmed regional disease trends, accurately, but usually days or weeks after the fact. Ickly answers a different question: what is going around my child's school this week. It is faster than official surveillance and more structured than a Facebook group, and it is designed to be an early signal rather than a clinical record.
Is Ickly free?
Yes for parents, and always will be. We make money from paid plans for schools, daycares, and clinics that want their own dashboards and insights, which is why we have never needed to sell family data.
Should I use Ickly instead of calling my doctor?
No. Ickly tells you what is circulating so you can recognize it earlier and ask better questions. It is not a diagnosis, not medical advice, and not a substitute for care. If you are worried about your child, call your pediatrician.
Go deeper
Everything above is documented in more detail here.